


The Language of Flowers

by subtlyfailing



Series: hold your head high, child, you were born to make mountains crumble [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Epilogue, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, I swear it has a happy ending, Loss, Loss of Innocence, Loss of Parent(s), Multi, Post-Canon, Post-War, man this is cheery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 16:52:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3297575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtlyfailing/pseuds/subtlyfailing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She reaches over, plucks the cigarette from Shikamaru's lips, and brings it to her own. Her throat burns and her lungs ache, but she doesn’t cough. There is a cold in her chest that she can’t relieve, the smoke feels like burning, but it feels like life.</p><p>“These things kill you,” she says to him, between drags of smoke.</p><p>“A lot of things do these days,” he answers, then lights another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Language of Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,  
> She wore her greenest gown;  
> She turned to the south wind  
> And curtsied up and down.  
> She turned to the sunlight  
> And shook her yellow head,  
> And whispered to her neighbour:  
> 'Winter is dead.'  
> \- A. A. Milne

Ino is seven when she first discovers the flower fields.

It’s after a fight with Shikamaru, something silly, something trivial that in a child’s mind is terrible. She runs out of the house alone, and doesn’t stop until she comes upon a remote field. She curls in on herself ad hugs her small, knobbly knees in the grass.

There are flowers there. Pretty things. Wild things that her mother names weeds and plucks from their flower beds with sure hands.

Ino reaches out and plucks a flower, too. With hands that wants her mother’s elegance and her father’s strength. A yellow flower. Daffodil.

 _Daffodils for happiness,_ she thinks, and plucks another.

 _“You are not unwanted”_ , she whispers to the bright yellow bud. _“You’re beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Like the first rays of sunshine after a bad storm”._

She weaves a wreath. Binds sun-yellow daffodils for happiness and coreopsis for cheerfulness and magnolia for nobility.

When Shikamaru finds her, she has bound one for him as well. A bright blue ring of hyacinths, for apologies.

 

After the war ends she goes outside once again to look for flower fields, but finds burnt grass and blood-stained soil in their place. And she finds Shikamaru as well, on the sloping remains of a hill where they once used to play. A cigarette is balanced in the crook of his mouth, glowing dim orange in the moonlight. Shikamaru smokes when he’s troubled. He has since they were fifteen, too young, trembling, watching their teacher bleed out on a muddy field. The sour smell of his cigarettes mixes with the ash and the dust from the battle; it’s enough to make her nauseous.

He doesn’t say anything when she reaches over, plucks the cigarette from his lips, and brings it to her own. Her throat burns and her lungs ache, but she doesn’t cough. There is a cold in her chest that she can’t relieve, the smoke feels like burning, but it feels like life.

“These things kill you,” she says to him, between drags of smoke.

“A lot of things do these days,” he answers, then lights another.

 

They grow up together, Shikamaru and her. Born a day apart, Ino never knows a world without him by her side.

They learn to walk together, how to throw their first kunai, when they master their jutsus, it is side by side. Shikamaru with all his smarts teaches her how to read at five years old. And eleven years later, they both lose their fathers to the same war.

Inoichi's presence is ripped from her mind the moment HQ is destroyed. Sounds of death and pain and fighting raging all around her, but nothing ever seemed so quiet.

She freezes, weeps, almost shuts down, breaks, but Shikamaru pulls her back with a quiet word. They share the pain, the sorrow, the bitterness.

They also share knowledge; war leaves no time to grieve. Ino wipes her tears and throws herself back into the fray.

She always falls, and he always catches her, this dry, world-weary boy she will always more than a brother, yet far differently than a lover. On bad nights, she would crawl into his room and underneath his covers – he would let her crawl in close.

Ino would lay in the dark and watch the stresses in Shikamaru’s spine – she would wonder how to fix him.

In the end, she never was the one who did.

 

“The fields have all burned down,” she mumbles into the night. “The flowers are all gone.”

They sit in silence on an ash-covered plain where they once used to play. The war has ended and everything is peaceful, even if the air still stinks of funeral pyres.

Shikamaru nods, contemplatively. There are stresses in his spine, and darker circles around his eyes than she can remember there ever was. He looks older than his years. Tired.

“More will blossom,” he says. “On the ashes of the old, they’ll bloom”.

 

In the calm of night a few weeks after the last battle, Ino goes to the smoking ruins of HQ. In front of the rubble that has become her father’s tomb, she breaks.

And she will put herself back together again. Over time. Quietly, carefully, painstakingly.

 

The language of flowers is a symbolic one. They say flowers mirror human life with their planting, their growth, their bloom and their withering.

When Ino mentions this, Tenten scoffs.

Months have passed, yet Tenten remains battle-worn and calloused. Ino sits cross legged on her bed amidst scrolls and weapons and battle gear, and tries not to notice how this bright, deadly girl keeps shoving as much risk as she can into her nineteen years of life. There’s scars on her skin, but her blades are unmarred. Polished and sharpened and ready for the next attack.

Nowadays, Ino always keeps fresh bandages on hand when the other is out on missions.

“We are ninja, we are not made to wither,” Tenten says. “We burn or we break, but we do not fade”.

Ino knows it’s true. She has seen shinobi break, she has seen them burn. She has seen lives be snuffed out like candles in a windstorm, held hands while life ebbs from veins.

Shinobi do not wither like flowers in fall. They live and they die spectacularly.

Neji did. Asuma did. Her father did. The wounded soldiers she tended to after the battle, those who bled out quickly, those who died slowly, in agony. None of them lived the years to wither. They had stood proudly until they couldn’t.

Ino lays poppies on their graves for remembrance, and sends Tenten a bouquet of Lily-of-the-valley for happiness. A return to it.

 

If Tenten is made of iron. Ino feels like she is made of glass.

 

At fifteen, her sensei dies on a cold and wet and bloodied field, and Ino arrives just in time to feel his heartbeats grow weakerunderneath her hands.

Shikamaru first starts stinking of cigarette smoke after that. Chouji doesn’t smile anymore. Ino wants to scream and thrash and weep, but she doesn’t. Instead, she scrubs her face of the tears there - the boys needed her to be strong. She closes the cellar door on childhood. Hides a scared little girl’s whimpers behind the loudness of her fifteen year old voice - when Shikamaru is lost in the expanses of his own mind, and Chouji is weighed down by his insecurities, she wants to be the lifeline that drags them both back to reality.

 _And she is -_ on the scrambling chaos of a battlefield where Asuma who was dead, suddenly isn’t.

Asuma who was dead, yet who stands right in front of her, of them, the same but for his ashen skin, his black as coal eyes.

Ino swallows bile, but keeps her focus on the two boys by her side. On the stresses in Shikamaru’s spine, that she has grown up counting – on the tremble of Chouji’s fingers. She clutches their hands and tells them _let’s go._

When they cut him down, he whispers a _thank you_.

 

She moves back in with her mother when it all ends. Breaths in the calm of her childhood home and tries to wash the ashes of war from her bones.

Even if the house is heavy with the silences her father left behind, even if the lilies in her mother’s flower shop remind her of graveyards, even if her mother’s cheeks are growing hollow with grief.

Even if when the fighting subsides, her war does not end.

Because even though there are days when she thinks she is okay, she’ll spill hot tea all over her kitchen counter one morning, because of a bird rapping at her window pane.

The war lies in the way her heart races. The way adrenaline pumps through her body, her fingers itching to perform her jutsus. Her brain screaming at her. Common sense and trained instinct mixing into chaos. _There are no enemies,_ she tells herself _._ No enemies, yet her blood is pumping in her ears. _You’re home, it’s completely safe._ Yet fatigue takes her. Battlefields flash before her eyes. She has already used up too much chakra to perform her healing spells. Another one dies beneath her hands. _You’re completely safe._

When she finally catches up with the present, hot chamomile stains her shirt and the skin underneath is tender with burns.

She almost doesn’t notice.

 

The day after, she rearranges her mother’s flower shop. Moving crates and tables with arrangements, giving her a sure view of the entrance door.

 _(“Minimize your blind spots,”_ whispers her father in the back of her mind. _“Don’t give the enemy a chance to get the jump on you,”_ Asuma tells her in a memory. )

 _They won’t,_ she whispers back. And makes sure all the flower knives are sharpened.

 

The first time she took over another person’s mind, the sensation was so strong she almost lost herself. But her father was there, talking her through it. _Breathe in, breathe out, do not let their bloodlust be yours. You are strong Ino, so much stronger than they are._

Years and years later her father is buried in a tomb of smoking rubble, but his voice is forever imprinted in her mind. On a battlefield somewhere else, Ino still stands. She still stands, and she needs no one to hold her hand when she connects her thoughts to the entirety of the battlefield – relays Shikamaru’s plans to all of them.

When it all ends, she doesn’t use her father’s jutsu again for years.

 

“The war is over,” says her mother. Worry furrowing her brow, sorrow hollowing her cheeks. “Why won’t you leave it behind?”

They all mourn. They mourn her father, her friends, the heroic, bleeding boys who couldn’t be saved on those death-strewn fields. They mourn the dead, but Ino also mourns the living. The girl Tenten used to be, who flung her weapons with bright-eyed vigor – whose hands were steady and edges less sharp. She mourns for the dullness in Shikamaru’s eyes, the stresses in his spine. And she mourns herself. The stiff-necked, un-broken version of her.

War had taken it away, and for all her healing hands, for all her wandering minds, she cannot bring it back.

 

But she tries. She patches together her broken pieces, one by one. She binds bouquets of flowers for the dead, and for the living. She strings together nights of sleep until dark dreams don’t wake her up as often. When they do, she curls up in Shikamaru’s bed – the coldness of sorrow shared like all the years of their lives together.

Ino Yamanaka patches herself together, flowers and honeyed chamomile tea, nights of sleep and small but significant kindnesses.

 

Tenten keeps busy with missions. She packs her scrolls and her painted porcelain mask, and stays away for months at the time.

Ino fusses and worries and drops off care packages at the post office those few times she knows where to send them.

Sakura giggles when they meet one day.

“You always did love dragging home wild things to fix,” says she, eying the basket in Ino’s hands.

“Tenten is just really bad at maintaining a balanced diet, I worry”.

“Ino, there is chocolate in here, and… this looks like a purple rag?”

“That’s a scarf – I made it myself. It gets cold in Amegakure at this time of year. And for your information, chocolate is full of antioxidants, it has nutritional qualities –it’s a great anti-depressant”

“…Ino, a person’s pain can’t be relieved with knitwork and chocolate.”

 _(Ino,_ whispers her father _. Ino my little cosmos.)_

“I know that,” she says. And pays to have the basket sent by express mail.

 

At eleven years old, she had found a sparrow with a broken wing on a small patch of grass on her flower field. Shikamaru had been with her –telling her to break its neck. “When you’re hurt like that it can’t be mended,” he had said matter-of-factly.

Ino had not listened. She took the little thing home and nursed it back to health (she keeps in a shoebox in her room, away from her mother’s shrillness; _‘my god! it must have all kinds of diseases, take it out! wash your hands! don’t touch it!’)_

When it healed and flied off, Ino cried, and she laughed, and she ran off to her flower fields to find more broken things to fix.

 

Tsunade teaches her how to mend bones with her bare hands at thirteen. The first thing Ino heals is the leg of a stray kitten she finds in her back yard. She un-breaks this tiny fragile thing with her mother’s nimble hands.

 

It grows in her, this wish to protect. Bubbles in her belly from she is little. She is seven when she hears a girl call Chouji fat on the playground, and pushes her into the mud.

It’s that will to protect that has her split-lipped and bloody-kneed when Chouji is too gentle to fight for himself, when Shikamaru is too idle.

It’s the same will to protect that draws her to Sakura at first.

Sakura who is the opposite of everything Ino ever is or will be. Sakura with the pretty hair, with the big forehead, with the fragile self-confidence. Sakura with her eyes quietly on the ground and shoulders hunched as if trying to curl in on herself. Tiny. Frightened by the world. She is easy prey.

One day Ino watched bigger kids push her down and didn’t even have to think before stepping in. She takes her home and ties her hair back with a red ribbon. Then binds astromerias in her pink locks, “for friendship and sweetness,” she tells her.

They stuff nettles in the bullies’ lockers when they bother Sakura again - giggle until their sides hurt at the sight of them, scratching their stings in the hallways the day after.

(Sakura gives the ribbon back at twelve; a boy with black hair and a bloodied past had torn them apart years before - Ino goes home and throws all her mother’s astromerias in the garbage.)

 

She takes home birds to mend their wings and leave bowls of milk out on her porch for stray kittens in her neighbourhood. Her father tells her it’s a waste of good milk, her mother worries they will ruin her flower beds until the kittens purr in their laps on lazy Sunday mornings. After that, her father starts buying extra cartons of milk, and she swears she sees her mother grow a patch of catnip in a corner of her garden.

It’s how she mends her own brokenness. After Sasuke – after Asuma.

But there are no kittens in her back yard when the war ends. No birds whose wings she can heal. Instead, She spends her time in sterile hospital rooms, mending those wounded she can, holding the hands of those she cannot. (She sends lilies to the families of those she can’t save – fills their grief with kindnesses where she can).

 

Broken birds become broken boys that she takes home to fix. But this time not as simple as a jutsu or a shoebox or a bowl of milk on the front porch.

A boy with an old, engraved ring always in his jacket pocket, one with bruised knees who never tries to touch her, another, a calloused soldier with a knife underneath his pillow who holds her like she is porcelain, there were others as well - boys with cold eyes, with lie-shaped mouths and rough hands, girls with soft hands and softer lips, with eyes that has seen as much as she has. A redheaded nurse in an empty hospital corridor, who looks for someone to mend, just as much as Ino does. A girl with freckles like stars on her skin, who smells like spring. Who giggles as Ino braids flowers into her hair her mother’s nimble hands.

And Ino lets them touch her, fevered touchesfuelled by that hot, desperate need to hold something warm and living between her arms. Yet, no matter how tightly they hold her, it won’t be enough to throw the cold from her chest, but she thinks as she closes her eyes to their breathing that at least there is _life._

She learns all of their sharp edges; she lets them learn none of hers. How her house has ghosts in every corner, the way it no longer echoes with her father’s laughter – the way none of it holds a penny to the echo his silences has left in her mind. She never stays until morning.

 

“The war is over,” says the freckled girl to her on a bad night. When her shaking hands become too much for her to hold. “Why can’t you leave it behind?”

Ino closes her eyes. Against the backs of her eyelids is Asuma’s unmoving body, her ears are ringing with the silences her father left behind.

She thinks so fiercely of flower fields it makes her stomach churn.

She doesn’t answer.

 

When she sees Sasuke again after the war, she bares her claws.

“Sakura is not your redemption,” she hisses at him. Venom on her tongue, no tremble in her voice. “Her love for you will not absolve your sins – they will not cleanse your hands of all the blood and betrayals”.

“I don’t need you to tell me that,” says Sasuke, not unkindly. “I know I can never scrub myself clean of the things I’ve done, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try – I’ll try for the rest of my life”.

Ino watches this exiled soldier – this redeemed traitor – this prodigal son. She loved him once. Prayed for him. Cried for him. It had not been love she realised, years later. A want, yes, but not love. She wants to spit at her thirteen year old self for abandoning friendship over a bitter, imaginary love story.

Love over friendship. That is what makes them girls, she supposes. But not anymore.

She sniffs and exhales.

“If you hurt her,” she warns, voice loaded with all the poison and danger a war has taught her. All the desperate need to protect. “If you hurt her even one bit, I’ll cut your other arm off”.

In all that she is, she doesn’t have Sakura’s capacity for unconditional love, or Naruto’s for forgiveness. She’s grown out of that - left sentiment behind on a death-strewn battlefield.

But that doesn’t mean she can’t see the way Sakura’s eyes glint with joy when they see him. Ino is not deaf to the love her voice rings with when she talks about the gentleness of his touches. The way emerald green eyes shine the same way they always have when she talks about him.

Ino goes home and binds a wreath of lotus flowers and sends it to him with a note.

 _The lotus represents rebirth, the dawn after one’s darkest day,_ she writes, and then ads _don’t let us down._

 

She keeps a lotus wreath for herself as well. Spots it with lilies mourning the child she had been, and with daffodils for the sunshine that refuses to stop shining even on the worst of days.

Years go by and Ino grows taller, and trembles less at large crowds and dark corners. She works at the hospital and in her mother’s flower shop, goes out dancing with her friends, and laughs until her sides sting with Shikamaru and Chouji. She copes.

The war still lives within her, her father’s presence always at the back of her mind, but Ino drinks sweetened peppermint tea with Sakura and Tenten on cold nights. In the warmth of her bedroom, they laugh like they have never seen invasion and war - like they have never buried friends or fathers.

 

Maybe the next time Ino uses her father’s jutsu, it’s ten years after the war, and it’s more on accident than anything else.

“Stop! Thief!” cries a woman outside her mother’s shop, and Ino’s body reacts on its own. The next thing, she sees herself fall to the ground through someone else’s eyes. No one is there to catch her, but it’s alright, she has taken worse tumbles and survived.

 

Years and years go by, and Tenten bears a porcelain mask and a blood-red tattoo, Sakura has advanced through the ranks of the hospital, and Shikamaru has found companionship in Temari, who knows much better than Ino herself how to relax the stresses in his back (Ino is in charge of the flowers for the wedding, she weaves desert roses together with traditional flowers in the bouquet – she leaves the baby’s breath out – none of them are pure enough for them now, not even as brides.)

Ino comes to tire from the smell of lilies, from holding dying hands. Tenten takes her to the Intelligence Division one day, where her father had worked. She holds her trembling fingers patiently as Ino walks the halls that he had walked before her.

“ _They need your mind here,”_ Tenten whispers to her. The interrogation chamber is too small and too bright, a boy is sat in the middle of the room. Too young, with eyes that had seen as much as she had. Tenten’s mask is momentarily lifted, chocolate brown meets azure blue. _“Ino, you are strong. You are needed,”_ she says _._

Ino had grown up with her mother’s elegance. Her father’s strength. She had a lifetime of knowing what it meant to belong in her own mind – what it meant to invade others’ - distinguish their feelings from her own. The boy’s hisses at her when she opens her mind to his, and she almost trembles at the force of it; the muddled mess of anger and loathing and flashing, frightening memories.

But she finds the info she needs, and when they leave the room, Tenten smiles.

“They would have resorted to torture without your help, you know.” She says, “you did something good today”.

When they offer her a job as an interrogator, Ino accepts without thought. She stops bringing broken boys home after that; the ninja who are placed in front of her are broken enough for all of them. Ino sits down in front of them, and when she closes her eyes she has no problem keeping their bloodlust from overtaking her senses.

Ino Yamanaka has spent her life knowing what it means to belong in her own mind – for the first time in years; comes to know what it means to belong beyond it.

 

Ino puts herself together again over years and years. She interrogates lost boys without the use of knives or cruelty – she has a loud voice and a clever mind, and she knows how to use them both. There were still bad days, days when she weaves wreaths and brings them to her father’s grave. Years and years go by, and the war becomes a distant memory; Ino works and grows and laughs and falls in love eventually.

Sai does not become the end of her story, nor is he the beginning. He is a part of it – a boy, now a man, who is wary of the same shadows she is. Who knows how to hold her trembling hands when the nights become too pressing.

She will have a child someday. A pale boy with his father’s smile and his grandmother’s nimble hands. Ino will watch this boy grow, and know that it was all worth it.

Maybe he too will find the flower fields one way, knobbly knees in the tall grass and careful hands plucking bright yellow buds. Maybe she will find him there on rainy days too –Maybe she will smile and teach him how to bind hyacinths into crowns for forgiveness – and she will also teach him how to look into someone’s mind, and know their fears from his own. Maybe her father’s ghost still whispers in the back of her thoughts – he will always be there, but it’s quieter.

It’s years after the war, and all is well now. Ino will take his hand, and they bring daffodils to her father’s grave together. For happiness.


End file.
